No Friday evening column, as the mother of all political news stories – or the big one this fortnight (a Brit term – sorry) – is still breaking. A full column will follow tomorrow, when the dust settles. But there will be no government shutdown, maybe. The real vote on whatever was agreed on comes next Thursday, when tonight’s extension expires. We’ll see.

As for now, everyone is angry, and no one quite knows the actual details of the compromise, or whatever it was. But one must deal with the underlying notion here, which Obama clearly buys into, that removing forty to eighty billion dollars from the economy – money people would use to, you know, buy things – is the right thing to do.

But that doesn’t exactly assure prosperity and jobs all around. Actually it assures the opposite. But that is now the accepted wisdom. The problem is finding a way to explain just how nutty a notion that is, with appropriate supporting detail.

And that must wait until what just happened, or didn’t happen, becomes clear. So it’s time to do some digging, in the dust.

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About Alan

The editor is a former systems manager for a large California-based HMO, and a former senior systems manager for Northrop, Hughes-Raytheon, Computer Sciences Corporation, Perot Systems and other such organizations. One position was managing the financial and payroll systems for a large hospital chain. And somewhere in there was a two-year stint in Canada running the systems shop at a General Motors locomotive factory - in London, Ontario. That explains Canadian matters scattered through these pages. Otherwise, think large-scale HR, payroll, financial and manufacturing systems. A résumé is available if you wish.
The editor has a graduate degree in Eighteenth-Century British Literature from Duke University where he was a National Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and taught English and music in upstate New York in the seventies, and then in the early eighties moved to California and left teaching.
The editor currently resides in Hollywood California, a block north of the Sunset Strip.

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This site offers a daily column on current events, and unlike other blogs, in long form. Short posts pointing to this and that and saying "Oh my!" seems a bit lazy. Columns here are an attempt to think things through. If you'd like to come along for the ride, fine. If you have neither the time nor patience for that, that is also fine - you can click on the LINKS tab at the top of the page and visit the sites that offer quick hits. Those provide the raw material for the analyses here.

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